Blog monitoring: Pay or DIY options

I received a press release on Wednesday announcing BlogSquirrel, "a new service that enables businesses to monitor efficiently the contents of over 100,000 blogs," it says. While I admire the way in which CyberAlert, the provider, has spotted an apparent market gap and developed a service that lets you search, monitor and clip blog content […]

Blogger.com now in 10 languages

Google has launched 9 internationalized language versions of its Blogger free blog hosting service, according to an Infoworld report. Key Blogger sections, such as its sign-in and account pages, are now available in Japanese, traditional Chinese, simplified Chinese, Korean, French, Italian, Spanish, German and Brazilian Portuguese, in addition to English, making 10 languages in total. […]

Webinar on blogging for business

If you want to learn what blogging means for your business and how you can “blog for business,” this free one-hour webinar on 16 December could be helpful. Starting at 2pm US Eastern Time (that’s 7pm GMT), the webinar will cover: Marketing Content vs. Editorial Content Blogs vs. CMS (Content Management System) Blogs vs. Chat/Discussion […]

Mapping visitors

As ever an embracer of new tools and apps that let me customize my Windows or my blog, I’ve just found a rather interesting tool that will show who’s visiting my blog at any given moment. What’s cool about this one is that it shows this info as a world map and identifies which countries […]

New PubSub tool to measure link rankings

While content has always been regarded as king in most communication, that’s not necessarily the most important thing any more, especially with blogs. Linking and referring – these are likely to become far more important, where what you say is one thing: who links to what you say is another. So I was very interested […]

How to read a blog

Tech columnist John Dvorak has written a good starter’s guide on how to read a blog. Written for his blog specifically, it’s nevertheless a good general introduction to understanding the content structure of blogs, and illustrates with diagrams the common elements in most blogs, including links, categories, comments and quotations. Helpful for blogging newbies.

Podcasts for communicators to launch in January

Cross-posted from For Immediate Release, the new podcast weblog by Shel Holtz and I: Starting in January, Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz – two communicators who think they have something to say that you might find worth listening to – start their weekly podcasts. Shel’s in Concord, California, and Neville’s in Amsterdam in The Netherlands. […]

Podcasting and vlogging: It’s all about the distribution

Media reports on two rapidly-emerging communication tools – (audio) podcasting and video logging, or vlogging or vblogging: BBC News on podcasting, featuring pioneer Adam Curry: An Apple iPod or other digital music players can hold anything up to 10,000 songs, which is a lot of space to fill. But more and more iPod owners are […]

The Hobson and Holtz Report – Podcast #1: January 3, 2005

Show notes for January 3, 2005 Welcome to our first podcast, a 43–minute conversation recorded live via Skype from Concord, California, USA, and Amsterdam, The Netherlands! Download the file here (MP3, 19.85Mb), or sign up for the RSS feed to get it and future shows automatically. (For this, you’ll need an ipodder, software that lets […]

New BlogJet version released

BlogJet is a very good offline editing application for your blog. I’ve been using it for some months (I reviewed it in comparison with ecto for Windows, which I also use, in September). Yesterday, version 1.5 was released (download link). I’ve just downloaded and installed it, and I’m writing and will publish this post with […]

How to enhance your search engine ranking

If you want to know why the relationship between blogs and search engines is important, here’s a good place to start. T. L. Pakii Pierce of How to Blog for Fun and Profit! has written "Search Engine Marketing for Beginning Bloggers." The bottom line: […] Blogs are natural search engine optimization tools. The search engines […]

The Hobson and Holtz Report – Podcast #4: January 24, 2005

Show notes for January 24, 2005. Welcome to our weekly podcast, a 57:25-minute conversation recorded live via Skype from Concord, California, USA, and Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Download the file here (MP3, 24.9MB), or sign up for the RSS feed to get it and future shows automatically. (For this, you’ll need ipodder, software that lets you […]

The Hobson and Holtz Report – Podcast #5: January 31, 2005

Show notes for January 31, 2005. Welcome to our weekly podcast, a 71:55-minute conversation recorded live via Skype from Concord, California, USA, and Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Download the file here (MP3, 33.7MB), or sign up for the RSS feed to get it and future shows automatically. (For this, you’ll need ipodder, software that lets you […]

Technorati tags just work

One thing I’ve had some difficulty in fully understanding is how the new Technorati tags work. For instance, I’d regard this post as to do with weblogs. So based on how I understand the system, what I’d do is include this tag: <a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/Weblogs” rel=”tag”>Weblogs</a> The text in red is the key bit. It seems […]

The Hobson and Holtz Report – Podcast #6: February 7, 2005

Show notes for February 7, 2005. Welcome to our weekly podcast, a 46:41-minute conversation recorded live via Skype from Concord, California, USA, and Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Download the file here (MP3, 21.4MB), or sign up for the RSS feed to get it and future shows automatically. (For automatic synchronization with your iPod or other digital […]